17 July 2014

SharePoint TimeCard Soon To Be Released

The development of a SharePoint version of the kalmstrom.com application for time reporting directly from the calendar is nearly finished. We are now in the testing and documentation phase, and today I can give you a first glimps of this much longed-for solution. Some design details might be changed in the final version, but the slideshow below will still give you a good picture of TimeCard for SharePoint.

No double entries
The main idea behind TimeCard is that users should report time from the platform where they plan their work days. When their calendar appointments are tagged with time reporting data, these appointments can be used for reporting and the data does not have to be transferred somewhere else.

From Outlook to SharePoint
Fourteen years ago, when I developed the first version of TimeCard, the obvious platform was Microsoft Outlook. Most people worked at the office, and workgroups were often gathered in the same place and connected via a local network.

Today we have a different situation. More people work from home or from other places, and workgroups can very well be geographically dispersed – like the kalmstrom.com team. Outlook is still a very useful platform, but now we also have SharePoint, a later Microsoft product that gives us new possibilities.

By creating a TimeCard solution that works with SharePoint, kalmstrom.com can offer an efficient way to report time to people who use the internet rather than a local network to connect to and share information with management and team mates.

TimeCard calendarsTimeCard for SharePoint will not use the standard SharePoint calendar. Instead TimeCard will create new calendars for each user. These calendars will have dropdowns for selection of tag values in each appointments, and each calendar will also have a reporting button, that opens a reporting dialog.

In the TimeCard reporting dialog the users can review their appointments before they are reported. Any changes made in the reporting dialog will be reflected back to the calendar. With a press of a button the data will be reported to a list created by TimeCard.

Excel reports and statistics
Before the data for the selected period is reported, it is possible to export it to an Excel file. Excel is also used in the statistics reports. There are several different default reports, but custom reports can also be created, saved and updated with new reported information.

Sandboxed SolutionTimeCard for SharePoint is a Sandboxed SharePoint Solution that should be uploaded to a SharePoint solution gallery and activated there and on each site in the collection where it should be used. It will support types of SharePoint 2010 and 2013. TimeCard for SharePoint also supports Office 365 SharePoint, which is what we have used in the slideshow below.

I hope to soon come back to you with more information about our new TimeCard version! In the meantime we will continuously update our website as more documentation on TimeCard for SharePoint is created.
By Peter Kalmstrom
CEO and Systems Designerkalmstrom.com Business Solutions